Note: I’ve been contacted by a lawyer representing Sony and they have asked me to remove the audio clip. Sorry.

[Warning, spoilers.] Here’s a two-minute audio clip of Final Jeopardy from Ken Jennings’ Jeopardy loss (due to air Nov 30). If you don’t want to listen, here are the details (highlight the redacted text to read):

[Update: I deleted the description of the audio clip after Sony “requested” that I do so. You may be interested in reading this article in the Washington Post instead. This is really a irritating situation, but I don’t have the time, energy, or the access to legal counsel that a large newspaper does and am therefore just basically just rolling over. Sorry.]

The original tips I got from Phillip (1, 2) ended up being pretty accurate. Some of the details were a little off and/or paraphrased (he got the number in the answer as well as the woman’s name wrong), but it was mostly correct.

Final Jeopardy category was Business and Industry. Answer: Most of this firm’s 70,000 seasonal white-collar employees work only 4 months a year. Nancy Zerg provided the correct question, “What is H&R Block?” which gave her $14,401, one dollar more than Ken. Ken answered incorrectly: “What is FedEx?” and ended up with $8,799 for a total of $2,522,700 over his 75-day run.

Set your TiVos and VCRs…it looks like Ken Jennings will finally lose on Jeopardy on Tuesday, November 30. His 72nd appearance aired yesterday (he won another $50,000), the 73rd will be today, and his final win will come on Monday. As reported here back in September, Jennings loses his 75th game after winning $2.5 million. No one from the show has confirmed this, so it may be wrong**, but we’ll find out on Tuesday. (If it ends up being wrong, I will commit seppuku by falling on my TiVo remote for my role in misleading everyone.)

** Just to be more specific, I have recently received confirmation from a very reliable source that Ken has indeed lost, but that source didn’t confirm (or deny) the specific timing.

Every year around this time, my thoughts turn to Wes Anderson and Futura. As noted elsewhere, Mr. Anderson is consistent in his use of Futura (bold) in his films. The supporting materials for The Life Aquatic (which opens here in NYC on Dec 10) continue the Futura trend, with the font appearing in the trailers and on posters. (A little Helvetica — or worse, Arial — has somehow crept onto this new poster, probably slapped on there by some intern when Someone Important noticed that Bill Murray’s name wasn’t on there.) What I’ve never been able to find an answer to, Wes, is why the Futura? This Typophile thread (kind of) suggests that David Wasco, Anderson’s production designer on Tenenbaums, may have had something to do with it. Or is it a shout-out to Stanley Kubrick, who was partial to Futura Extra Bold? Does anyone know?

A serving of broccoli is naturally rich in vitamins A and B, and has more vitamin C than citrus fruit. But raised in an industrial farm monoculture, shipped over a long distance and stored before and after being delivered to your supermarket, it loses up to 80 percent of its vitamin C and 95 percent of its calcium, iron and potassium. Fruits and vegetables grown organically, however, have higher levels of antioxidants. That’s largely because a plant’s natural defense system produces phenolic compounds, chemicals that act as a plant’s defense against pests and bugs. These compounds are beneficial to our health, too. When plants are grown with herbicides and pesticides, they slow down their production of these compounds.

Broccoli is only one example…turkeys, chickens, beef, eggs, carrots, milk, beets, etc. are all made less nutritious and delicious by current methods of mass production. We’re painting ourselves into a corner here. Soon even the non-processed food we eat will be almost entirely virtual. Our flavorless, nutrient-free broccoli will be artificially flavored, artificially colored, and supplemented with multivitamins (Centrum-brand broccoli?) and result in meals that are artificially satisfying. (via tmn)

Starbucks as an example of asynchronous processing. “The interaction between two parties (customer and coffee shop) consists of a short synchronous interaction (ordering and paying) and a longer, asynchronous interaction (making and receiving the drink).”

Most importantly. “Listen to music a little louder, dance a little crazier, sing out loud in the shower, honk your horn for no reason, give your dog an extra treat, call your mother and tell her you love her, hug your friends even if they aren’t the touchy-feely type, eat french fries once even though your diet tells you not to, walk around your house naked, and hold tight to your motherfucking family.”

A few weeks months ago, I chose this book as the first official selection of the unofficial kottke.org book club. The idea of the book club is that I tell you what book I’m going to read next, you can read along if you’d like, and then we get together to discuss it in the comments of a thread like this one.

What a terrible idea…I apologize for even suggesting it. I have trouble reviewing books as it is without the added pressure of a deadline and having people (if any of you actually chose to follow along) who read the book depending on me getting some sort of rip-roaring conversation going. As a result, even though I finished the book weeks and weeks ago, I’ve been avoiding writing this review. However, since I got myself into this, I’m going to give it a shot and hope that someone else can rescue us with a thoughtful, knowledgeable review of the book and/or the comics format in the comments. Here we go.

Many of my friends are into comics in one way or another. I never was, not even as a kid (ok, not exactly true…I really liked Bloom County). I go into comic shops, thumb through comic books and graphic novels, and leave wondering what the hell all the fuss is about. I guess you could say I don’t get comics. Which is odd because as a sort of socially awkward dork, I should identify with many of the characters in the stories and the artists drawing them (and I mean that in a good way).

A few years ago, I bought Chris Ware’s perfect Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, one of my all-time favorite pieces of media. But that’s been the exception to the rule for me and comics. McSweeney’s #13 contained a comic by Chris Ware (he designed the wonderful dust cover as well); it, The Little Nun strips by Mark Newgarden, and the wonderfully spare comics by Richard McGuire (which reminded me of Powers of Ten) were the highlights for me.

So instead of a review, a question. What am I missing here? Why do you enjoy comics and/or graphic novels? I can guess why they are appealing, but I’d rather hear about it from you guys.

The lost journals of Doogie Howser, M.D.. “Sometimes the best advice is in the last place you look, and by ‘best advice,’ I mean, ‘my wristwatch.’ And by ‘the last place you look,’ I mean, ‘Mr. Cheswick’s esophagus.’”

I woke up with a hangover this morning, which is odd because I don’t drink. Maybe it had something to do with reading about PHP right before bedtime. I’ve heard PHP is just a gateway drug for Python, so I’m not looking forward to how I’ll feel after reading about that.

My insomnia appears to be lifting…I slept until 10:30 on Saturday and the alarm woke me up this morning. Barely. The buzz around the water cooler was that I was either depressed or affected by daylight savings time, but I think it was just general stress.

(Still reading? Most boring entry ever, right? Be thankful I didn’t regale you with how I got off the subway this morning. Said tale would have included the line, “wielding my New Yorker magazine like a machete, I slashed my way through the dense thicket of #9 train commuters…” You would have hated me for it.)

After the Met yesterday, I sat on the stairs to watch these two street performers who were really quite good. At the end of the show, one of them did a flip over four people. I made this composite of the photos I took of his jump:

As part of a lazy Sunday here in NYC, I ducked into the Met for a couple of hours and wandered around. I’ve seen the whole muesum at least twice, but I never get tired of it. The Gilbert Stuart exhibition is worth checking out (the room with several of his Washington portraits is fantastic), but NYC photography fans will want to check out Few Are Chosen, an exhibition of street photography. Featured are the photographs of Walker Evans (he took photos of NYC subway riders with a hidden camera), Helen Levitt’s photos of NYC street scenes, gritty photos of NYC by an artist whose name I forget, as well as a selection of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work. The collection is fairly small but well worth checking out if you’re into that sort of thing.

The main character and narrator initially spent $218 making this film on his Mac and ended up with something that is remarkably sharp and almost professional, considering he used iMovie to edit it. Caouette pieced the film together — according to Ebert’s review — from “old home movies, answering machine tapes, letters and telegrams, photographs, [and] clippings” so effectively that it seems like the 30 years of media was recorded with the movie in mind. The feel with which Caouette crafted Tarnation reminded me of Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream and Pi…same twitchy editing and musical style combining to make a powerful and affecting film.

Since two Fridays ago, I have been unable to sleep past 7:30 in the morning, no matter what time I go to sleep or what time I am required to get up. In the months prior to that, I can count on one hand the number of times I awoke before my alarm at 7:45. I have no idea what’s causing this.

Finally got the chance to check out Daisy May’s BBQ with a friend last night. We wandered over to the restaurant, but I would recommend getting delivery instead (there are no tables, just a small counter), which according to to CitySearch, is free anywhere in the city. I had a beef brisket sandwich with pickles and onions (yummy!) while Nichol had a whole, like, 2 quarts of creamed spinach which she completely finished so it must have been good.

While I was waiting outside Daisy May’s for my companion to arrive, a horse-drawn carriage sped by on 11th Ave. His horse at a full trot, the driver loudly sang the chorus to “Zombie” by the Cranberries:

Update: It looks like Netcraft was a little overzealous in reporting the dangers this policy change poses and I misunderstood what is at issue here. Michael Moncur explains:

1. This policy is for registrar transfers, not ownership transfers. It doesn’t make it any easier for a domain to be hijacked, except perhaps by a corrupt registrar.2. The gaining registrar is still required to confirm the transfer: A transfer must not be allowed to proceed if no confirmation is received by the Gaining Registrar.

The policy change is to keep registrars from holding domains hostage when people wish to transfer them, which is a worthy goal. I don’t want my domains to go to another registrar, so I’ve still got them transfer locked, but it’s unlikely that anyone will have to cancel their vacation just to keep an eye on their domain names. Embarrassed apologies for any panic induced…my ass has been fact checked and it’s a little sore.

Domain transfer requests will be automatically approved in five days unless they are explicitly denied by the account owner. This is a change from current procedure, in which a domain’s ownership and nameservers remain unchanged if there is no response to a transfer request. This could mean trouble for domain owners who don’t closely manage their records. Domains with incorrect e-mail addresses and outdated administrative contact information are at particular risk, as the domain’s WHOIS database information will be used to inform domain owners of transfer requests. A non-response becomes the equivalent of answering “yes” to a transfer request, according to the ICANN policy change.

What this means is that any dufus can drop 20 domain names into this form at register.com, hope that a couple of those folks don’t get the emails from their registrars about the transfer (because they’re on vacation for a week, the email gets spam filtered, etc.), and take those domains from their rightful proprietors. You probably have some sort of recourse through your registrar or ICANN, but I wouldn’t expect it to be particularly timely (more than 5 days certainly) or rigorous.

So, what can you do about this? Some suggestions:

1. Make sure your contact information listed with your domain registrar is up to date. If a transfer request comes in for a domain you own and your email address on file with them no longer works, you won’t hear about it until your domain name redirects to big-hot-mammas.com.

2. Don’t go on vacation for more than 4 days or have someone check your email while you’re gone. Impractical, but whaddya gonna do?

4. Some domain registrars allow you to “transfer lock” your domains. Do so now. According to one disgruntled register.com customer, register.com has no such feature at this time….you’re on your own, sucker!

Pretty much every day for the last year and a half or so, I stop at the same deli to purchase some orange juice on the way to work. When I first started going, there were two Asian women who operated the cash registers and seeing them churn through customers was like watching a fine ballet or elite athletes at the top of their game. They knew the price of every item in the store, had your change to you almost before you’d paid them, and had everything in a bag in the blink of an eye, all while constantly chattering back and forth in their native tongue and bantering with customers, everything on autopilot. They moved so fast that they could have been picking pockets as well and no one would have noticed.

One morning about nine months ago, I came in to find that one of the two women was gone and had been replaced by another woman who, it seemed, had never worked in such a fast-paced environment. She was sooo slow. Her more experienced counterpart served 4-5 customers in the time it took her to serve one…it was almost painful to observe, like watching me playing Kasporov in chess. I felt bad for her and figured she wouldn’t last more than a few days, but the next couple of months saw steady improvement as she learned the job and got used to the routine. However, she was still not as fast as the other woman by at least a factor of two.

All that has changed in the last month. I don’t know what happened, but the new woman is now working as fast and efficiently as her partner. And what’s more, she has learned my individual habits (no bag or napkin unless I get something to eat and no straw unless it’s a carton), something which the other two women had never done despite my daily visit. It’s been fun watching her develop into a kick-ass employee and now when I go in, I try to pay at her register if I can.

[Potential Jeopardy spoilers] Ken Jennings is still ruling the airwaves on Jeopardy…he won his 69th game yesterday and has amassed a little over $2.3 million in winnings. As reported here in September, Ken’s run is due to end after his 74th win. His 70th show is tonight, followed by two weeks of the college tournament ending on Nov 23. Assuming that Jeopardy does not air on Wed-Fri due to the Thanksgiving holiday** and returns to a normal schedule the next week, his final win will occur on Thu, Dec 2 and he will finally lose on Fri, Dec 3.

** If Jeopardy shows are aired over Thanksgiving, his 75th show will air on Tue, Nov 30 instead. That’s the earliest the show would air if you’re determined not to miss it. I’m sure we’ll know more about the exact scheduling as the end of the month approaches and I’ll let you know when I know.

Since someone’s always hooking up, getting wasted or starting a fight these days, my standard for a great party is somewhat higher. Most importantly, there must be a MIX - Vampires and diamond dealers, legends and New Kids, fetishists and objects of worship, romantics and cynics, geeks and pop stars, boys, girls and everything in between. Historically, New York’s best parties (and club nights) have combined all ages, gender prefs, income levels and style schools. A roomful of one kind of person is boring and predictable - it is the mark of the provinces.

What’s true for parties is also true for ideas, friends, and experiences; diversity is a good thing.

The Incredibles is just a flat-out fun movie. Tons of laughs, some nice family moments, and lots of explosions and cool stunts (although the latter were somewhat subdued because of the crappy sound in our theatre). Elastigirl is my new favorite superhero…great superpowers, a wonderful mom, and she vacuums too. Edna Mole, voiced by Brad Bird, who also wrote and directed the film, was the funniest character, but the uber-quick Dash provided the best laugh of the movie for me. The film was also packed with references to other movies. I only caught the Star Wars ones, but I’m sure that some industrious movie nerds are even now compiling an extensive list of references which will be available on the web soon.

I don’t think America is that divided. I think most of us are ill-informed in two major ways, “conveniently” split along the lines of the two major political parties available to us. We’re told we have two different choices — you’re rooting for this team or that team and the other team is the enemy — and we believe that and organize our beliefs accordingly. There’s a lot of fear and emotion involved on both sides. I can’t count how many times in the last two days I’ve heard self-righteous “liberals” call the entire middle of the country “stupid”. Kerry voters, we need to get over ourselves…we’re not special. We’re not informed by some superior intelligence that gives us a unique insight into how the world should work. We buy into the Democratic Party/liberal/anti-conservative/fear the church crap in the same way that our “red state” brethren buy into the Rebublican Party/conservative/anti-liberal/fear the gays bullshit.

Half the country is not stupid. We’re all stupid. We’re convinced several times a day to do things that aren’t in our best interests. We work too hard. We’re drinking, eating, medicating, and smoking ourselves into early graves. We overextend ourselves on credit. We knowingly stay in emotionally or physically abusive relationships. We let television raise our children. We’re deliberately mean and nasty to people we don’t like or agree with. We learn science from the Bible. We stay silent when speaking out would help someone. We fear the future. We fear death. And we’re lazy about our beliefs and convictions and we let the Democratic and Republican Parties dictate the political agenda in America by pushing our emotional buttons. Red, blue, black, white, brown, yellow, purple, and retina-burning yellow-green…we all share the blame.

Speaking of, I’ll tell you who’s smart. Karl Rove is smart. Karl Rove knows all of the above and used it perfectly to his advantage. It’s not necessarily that America as a whole validated the actions of George Bush over the past four years…it’s that the Republican Party got more of their people to the polls than the Democrats did. Looking out across America, what’s one of the largest groups of people with a single strongly-held set of beliefs? The evangelical Christians. They comprise a large portion of the US population and believe in God more strongly than most other groups believe in anything. The Bush camp used a coordinated campaign to speak directly to those people and put their strong belief in God in direct opposition to what the other side stood for: liberals want to kill innocent babies, allow gays to marry, and let non-Christians run the country/world. To an evangelical Christian, the fear that those things will happen is almost overwhelmingly unbearable. Based on that emotional appeal, they turned out in droves, voting for Bush in greater numbers than in 2000 and overwhelming the increased turnout on the other side of the aisle.

The Democrats, with ill-defined fears of a mishandled Iraq war, America’s place in the world, personal freedoms, anti-science agenda, the economy, and Bush’s general stupidity, couldn’t muster the same kind of turnout. They and their supporters ran a more decentralized campaign, with blogs, 527 groups, and assorted other groups all having their own agendas. Liberals had a million slogans, initiatives, and platforms, each tailored for a different group of people. In theory, this was lauded as a fantastic idea…you could reach more people with less organization and target small groups of people with exactly the message that would appeal to each group. But it didn’t work out that way. The top-down campaign with the one focused message targeted at a large group of people won out.

The Internet is on fire today with all the election stuff going on and it ain’t pretty. Mypollingplace.com is down as are many of the state election polling place locators (the NY state one is throwing a “Web server too busy, try again later”). Rock the Vote has been up and down. Many weblogs covering the election are having problems too. Instapundit, Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, and Boing Boing have all been down or really slow at some point today. The large news sites like CNN and MSNBC are fine…they’re architected to handle huge surges like this. kottke.org is doing OK as well, but I’m not seeing anywhere near the traffic that Instapundit must be getting today. As great as the Internet is, it still sucks to have these single points of failure. When Boing Boing’s single server goes down or their router is handling too many requests, the site is completely offline. We need to get to the point where single sites and applications are as robust as the Internet at large.

As important as this particular presidential election is, I’m more interested in the longer term factors affecting the voting process in the US. The electoral college system, how the media’s election day coverage influences voter turnout, the construction and dissemination of information to voters by state and federal authorities, the voting process…basically the user experience of voting.

So if you’ve voted today (or earlier by absentee ballot), I’d like to ask you: how did your voting experience go? Any problems? How did you find out where to go and when? Did you vote using a computer? Any better/worse than a paper ballot? Were election officials helpful? Was there anything in particular you wished had been done differently? If you planned on voting and were unable to, what was the reason? Those are just suggested questions…basically I’d just like you to share the story of your voting experience, from registering to the actual voting process. In sharing our stories, maybe we can have some effect on changing what doesn’t work for the next election. Thanks.

Instead of endorsing a candidate for President (ok, short answer: voting strategically against Bush, not that my vote will make any difference in NY), I’d rather see who you guys are planning to vote for and make that the de facto kottke.org endorsement. I already know what the answer will be, but I’m curious to see the extent of the skew. So…

Ok, I think there are enough precincts reporting in and the percentages have stayed steady enough that we can comfortably call this sucker. FWIW, kottke.org officially endorses John Kerry in the 2004 Presidential election. What huge effect this will have on the election will be revealed tomorrow.

Your board of elections can tell you where to vote. If you can’t reach the board, a nonpartisan hotline, 1-866-OURVOTE, has a polling place locator. So does the Web site www.mypollingplace.com.

No voter can be turned away in any state this year without being allowed to vote. If there is a question about your eligibility, you must be allowed to vote on a provisional ballot, the validity of which will be determined later. But if you are entitled to vote on a regular ballot, you should insist on doing so, since a provisional ballot may be disqualified later on a technicality.

If you experience problems voting, or if you see anything improper at the polls, you may want to get help. It is a good idea to bring a cellphone, and phone numbers of nonpartisan hotlines like the Election Protection program’s 1-866-OURVOTE and Common Cause’s 1-866-MYVOTE1.

As long as you are in line before the polls close, you are legally entitled to vote. Do not let poll workers close the polls until you have voted.

So put those numbers in your cell phone and don’t leave until you’ve voted.

[Evolutionary theory is] such a dangerously wonderful and far-reaching view of life that some people find it unacceptable, despite the vast body of supporting evidence. As applied to our own species, Homo sapiens, it can seem more threatening still. Many fundamentalist Christians and ultra-orthodox Jews take alarm at the thought that human descent from earlier primates contradicts a strict reading of the Book of Genesis. Their discomfort is paralleled by Islamic creationists such as Harun Yahya, author of a recent volume titled The Evolution Deceit, who points to the six-day creation story in the Koran as literal truth and calls the theory of evolution “nothing but a deception imposed on us by the dominators of the world system.”

Flores Man lived at the same time as so-called modern humans and there could have been some interaction between the two groups. That’s troubling enough from a creationist’s perspective, but some Indonesian myths tell of tiny human-like/monkey-like creatures that are rumored to exist to this day and several eyewitness reports from various sources in Indonesia have hinted at the existence of a bipedal ape called orang pendek. If orang pendek does exist and turns out to be Homo floresiensis, what an amazing discovery that would be. But two different species of contemporary humans…that’s a troubling reality to deal with for those that believe strictly in the Genesis account of human origin and supremacy.